


Frozen Changeless in the Cage

by Luciel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Meta, Paradise Lost, Science, The Cage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:35:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luciel/pseuds/Luciel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A possible theory regarding Lucifer's cage, and the possibility that it was self-imposed rather than created by some external force. I threw some science and classical lit stuff in for good measure, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frozen Changeless in the Cage

While coldness does have an impressive number of symbolic connotations that are worth discussing in this context, I think it is equally valid to evaluate it at a more literal, scientific, chemical level. What is the effect of cold on atoms and molecules? Stillness. The particles comprising physical matter slow – potentially to the point of inertia – and therefore interact/bond with other particles less often because fewer collisions have the chance to occur. This is why chemical reactions take longer at lower temperatures; why, to use a mundane example, cream mixes with unstirred coffee more slowly when the beverage is chilled than when it’s hot. 

John Milton apparently was interested enough in basic physical law to include an approximation of it in Paradise Lost (which informs a significant amount of Supernatural’s Heaven, Hell, angels, and, most importantly, Lucifer mythology). In book V, Raphael has a chat with Adam about the nature of humans, angels, and their substances, in which he makes the curious assertion that, while angels exist primarily in spirit, they are physical enough to eat etc. He describes substance as a gradient, at the top of which is God. The angels are lower and more physical; humans lower; animals, plants, and dead objects lower still. Humans can move up the gradient by piety over time and become angelic (“Your bodies my at least turn all to spirit, / Improv’d by tract of time, and wing’d ascend / Etereal, as wee, or may at choice Here or in Heav’nly Paradise dwell; / If ye be found obedient”). He does not directly tell Adam what happens if someone were to be disobedient for a while but that’s implied, and Milton shows us more or less what happens to Satan over the course of the epic.

So. Satan. He falls, and it’s dramatic, and then he spends a while talking about how it sucks. The obvious read of this is that that’s it; he’s fallen; he’s not an angel anymore; he’s evil. But it’s Paradise Lost, and the point is not to demonize the devil. Instead, we get the dramatic fall, followed by subtle mentions throughout the ensuing story of Satan losing his angelic light, changing in appearance, and taking on baser qualities more and more. He did not go from angel to devil in the time it took to fall from the heavens to the pit; the actually important change from good to evil is a gradual process that occurs as a result of immoral behavior and thoughts. By the time Paradise Lost starts, Satan’s form has not actually changed very much at all – in fact, the fallen angels don’t think their appearance is any different than it was in heaven. He has not had time to move lower on the gradient of substance, so he remains mostly angelic.

He starts to realize, though, after spending a while in Hell and doing some questionable things, that he doesn’t look as shiny and pretty as he used to. Various other angels are kind enough to point it out to him. He is less than pleased.

If he were so inclined, how would he stop this slower, elemental fall? He could theoretically swallow his pride and try to repent, but no one would want that. So perhaps to stop a change in chemistry, he would elect to immerse himself in conditions in which a chemical change cannot occur. 

Because I would imagine that it is difficult even for him to lower the temperature of all of Hell, I propose that he partitioned off a corner in which to seal himself and froze it. This means that Lucifer himself made the cage that imprisons him, and that it started as a refuge rather than a jail. He could not bear to be surrounded by the hideousness of Hell and the atrocities he made of the human souls that ended up there. He hated that the heat of the inferno was changing him at his most basic physical level. He had to escape the chemical reaction between himself and his environment, so he stopped it by making himself static. If he pulled the temperature to absolute zero, which would ensure that no reactions and no change occurred, he would be unable to move even to free himself, so the cage would still be a cage inescapable from within, as it is in show canon.

By freezing himself, he kept the qualities of Heaven he retained after the big fall. He doesn’t lie; he uses few tricks; he still has something like his grace. It’s the perfect solution, isn’t it? He gets to stay physically and spiritually beautiful (a point of pride for him), and he gets to spite God by doing so. “You think you can ruin me by sending me away? Well look: I’m the same as always. Ha ha ha.” 

Admittedly, that does mean that he doesn’t get to really do much, and that he was locked in his own mind for as long as he stayed utterly frozen. Nonetheless, he does eventually get out (only to get thrown back down…but that’s another writing project), and he did manage to stay mostly intact. In some ways it would have been a choice between pride and agency, but for him I think the two ideas are so intertwined that it would have been more a choice between isolation and producing the outcome that would be expected from spending millennia (or more) in Hell. 

Maybe burning cold is just one more way of remaining unaffected by the ugliness of humanity – and therefore of rebelling against God.


End file.
